The road ahead for Scala

After months of tit-for-tat sparring between advocates and
antagonists over the usefulness of the complex language, the Scala
team is looking forward to the future – tentatively laying the
groundwork for their next IDE for Eclipse, Helium.

The three
milestones for Scala IDE V2 plan a huge redesign of the
plugin’s architecture as well as implementing an array of new
features. One key modification that has been targeted as a future
goal is the introduction of a clean and simple API to
developers interested in building plugins on top of the Scala
IDE.

Here is the complete roadmap and the suggested contributors
behind them. As you can see the Typesafe team make up the
majority.

Add support for Type Hierarchy (both in JDT and Scala specific)
- Typesafe team

Scala Search (implicit use) - Typesafe team

Add support Call Hierarchy - Typesafe team

Finalise the API in Scala IDE - Typesafe
team

Not aligned

More refactoring support - Mirko Stocker, Michael
Holzer

Specs2 support - Eric Torreborre?

ScalaTest support - Bill Venners?

There’s certainly a lot to be getting on with throughout the
year – and the Typesafe team even state how ambitious the first
milestone is. But we’re fairly sure that they are headed in the
right direction, especially with the addition of implicit and
semantic highlighting and the inclusion of Scala within Eclipse
Indigo.

But there’s more. The team also announced that the first
milestone of Scala
2.10.0 has been reached, allowing enthusiasts to test out
some of the latest features that are planned for the final
version.

Some of these features include the Preliminary Reflection
API, a faster inliner, various scaladoc improvements
(thanks to the docspree folks) and a virtualised pattern
matcher.

As you can well see, Scala is readying itself for an assault on
the masses and this year could signal its arrival as a mature
programming language. Those heated debates could be long gone but
don’t count on it.